1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile communication system. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for determining a maximum segment size (MSS) in a mobile communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a modern society, the penetration rate of a portable terminal has drastically increased due to its convenience and necessity, such that the portable terminal is now becoming a universal necessity of our contemporaries. Over time, service providers and terminal manufacturers continue to provide additional functions to increase utilization of the portable terminal, and especially with regard to data call services using the portable terminal that have been extensively used.
As mobile communication techniques continue to be developed, new data services of a very fast speed become available to users through the data call services. When a variety of data services are provided through the data call services, applications of the portable terminal need to determine a maximum transmission unit (MTU) and an MSS. The MTU refers to the maximum value of a packet frame size and the MSS means the maximum value of an original data size excluding a header of the MTU. The MTU and MSS need to be determined with an appropriate value based on a routing method of a server that needs to be accessed, an application property, and a server property. In more detail, if the MTU is too large, when a packet before reaching its destination reaches a router that cannot process packets of a corresponding size, the packet is fragmented and is re-transmitted. On the contrary, if the MTU is too small, the overhead increases due to frequent transmission of packets.
As mentioned above, in order to achieve effective operations of data services, the MTU and MSS need to be appropriately determined according to certain service properties. However, the portable terminal uses the MSS of a fixed value with respect to all data services. For example, even if a property of each application and an accessed server are changed, the portable terminal continues accessing each server using the same MSS. Accordingly, there is a need for an alternative proposal to improve the performance of data services determining and applying the optimized MSS value that is unknown heretofore.